Stop and smell the roses, and while you're at it, catch "Spring Forward." It's the kind of unpretentious movie that falls between the cracks, and for a certain kind of audience, the thoughtful kind, it would be a shame to miss.

It deals with the intersecting lives of two men, one on the way out and one trying to find his way back. Ned Beatty plays a park worker in a New England town, and Liev Schreiber is his new partner, a hotheaded ex-con.

Beatty's role is about that period of life, going into retirement, when a man realizes that he may have done something for the last time -- had sex, for instance. It is that period when it is pointless any longer to wonder what he is going to do with his life because he's already done it.

Beatty is the rock-solid actor viewers have come to expect over a long TV and movie career. Here, he never condescends to the role of an ordinary Joe whose horizons may not be as limited as they appear.

Schreiber has started to build a string of revelatory performances (including "A Walk on the Moon") in addition to his appearances in "Scream" and its sequels. Anger is only one of the ex-con's qualities. A closeted spiritual seeker ("You know about karma?" he asks), he's on a quest to discover why his life has no meaning.

Writer-director Tom Gilroy's approach sneaks up on the viewer. He has put together a series of vignettes as the seasons pass toward spring. Individually,

the vignettes are character studies. Taken together, a view of everyday life emerges: Savor it.

Characters the men run across include a well-meaning boss (Campbell Scott) and a flirtatious woman (Peri Gilpin of "Frasier").

The French have a different way of approaching affairs of the heart, at least onscreen. Forbidden love is tragic yet ennobling, and a woman's desire to escape a "suffocating" marriage isn't filtered through the moralizing lens of a Hollywood drama.

So goes "The Bridge," an engaging domestic drama that was co-directed by Gerard Depardieu, and stars the actor as the blue-collar husband of a philandering wife. Depardieu as a weak, ineffectual cuckold? Well, why not: If an actor can't cast himself against type, then who will?

It's 1962 and we're in a small provincial town where Depardieu lives with Mina (Carole Bouquet), the glamorous woman who had to marry him 15 years before when she bore his child. Clearly her husband's superior, Mina escapes the tedium of her life at the local movie house.

Temptation arrives in Mathias (Charles Berling), an urbane engineer who sits next to Mina at a "West Side Story" matinee and invites her for a drink. Caution melts into passion, and before long there's a raging affair that her son (Stanislas Crevillen) colludes in to hide it from his dad.

Mathias, also married, has come to the provinces to supervise the building of a bridge. But in keeping with the film's central metaphor, he's also erecting a bridge to freedom for the lovely, stifled Nina.

With its ultrasophisticated approach to infidelity, "The Bridge" is guaranteed to make Americans chuckle and say, "That is so French." Mina isn't made to suffer for her defection -- despite her husband's anguish -- and her teenage son, to whom she's unusually close, isn't damaged by the ordeal of covering for her.

Depardieu's direction is light-handed and sensitive, and gives the sad-eyed Bouquet a wonderful showcase for delicate, nuanced acting. The film ends on a blank, inconclusive note, but Bouquet and Berling more than justify our interest with their evocation of a fierce, inexorable love.

Mannered, measured and downbeat, the independent "Robert Louis Stevenson's The Suicide Club" follows the strangulating grief of a handsome British war hero in late 19th century London -- his beautiful wife has died and he just can't go on.

The film takes liberties with the Stevenson story. But only purists will carp at the adaptation by director Rachel Samuels ("The Running Woman"), who keeps a dark mood churning via rich, shadowy photography.

Overall, it's a slow ride and a bit too studied in emotional design. A more creepy and less thoughtful @break tone would have been an improvement.

Capt. Henry Joyce (David Morrissey, "Hilary and Jackie") is a war hero. He's haunted by his wife's death and obsessed with suicide. But he can't quite bring himself to do the deed.

Through a chance meeting, Joyce finds out about a secret club devoted to providing final curtains for the depressed and desperate. The members are all upper-crust types.

The club's founder, a maniacally ghoulish but erudite Mr. Bourne (Jonathan Pryce in a tailor-made role), deals cards at a round table to determine who is next on the death list -- and who, among the members, will be the mercy killer.

Most of the members can't wait for their death card to turn up. And at first, Joyce is among the most eager. But the club's only woman, a sorrowful blue blood named Sara Wolverton (Catherine Siggins), attracts his attention. She faintly resembles his late wife.

Some of the plot elements don't add up. But the film smartly spins on the increasing malevolence of Mr. Bourne -- who gets the members' estates once they croak -- and an awkward romance between Joyce, doubting his suicide drive,

and Sara.

One curiosity is that the film was produced by Roger Corman, the king of low budgets. Reportedly this production, filmed in Ireland, cost $2 million -- a bloated sum in the Corman canon.